


Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)

by kutsushita



Category: Der Rattenfänger von Hameln | The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Creepypasta, Crueltide, Dancing Mania, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 03:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17014542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kutsushita/pseuds/kutsushita
Summary: It's gonna make you sweat till you bleed





	Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_alchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/gifts).



My roommate roped me into it. There was some post on facebook called "The Pied Piper Challenge." He said a bunch of different schools were doing it, getting a big group of people together to dance or something. I thought it sounded pretty dumb, plus our school was tiny so there's no way we would have the biggest group or anything. But he and a bunch of other people from my dorm were into it, so I ended up going along.

Our school is small, like I said, and kinda out in the middle of nowhere, in this desert area. The meetup was on the edge of town, in a parking lot that faced into the desert, so we'd have a lot of open space, I guess. When we got there, it was near dusk, which seemed kinda dumb if they were hoping to take a video of it. Everyone was off beyond the parking lot where there were no streetlights, so I couldn't see that well, but there were a lot of people. Probably a hundred, or maybe more. It had to have been most of our school, and a bunch of the local high schoolers too.

I don't know who started dancing first. There wasn't even any music. I was standing near my friends, feeling pretty awkward. Everyone seemed kind of embarrassed and people kept giggling. But once that first person started dancing, it began spreading through the crowd. Soon the people next to us were dancing, then my friends joined in, and even though I felt pretty dumb I started dancing too. And for a little while, that was all it felt like. Just all of us, bored, feeling stupid, entertaining ourselves on a Saturday night by dancing silently in a big group in the middle of nowhere.

After a little while, I started feeling tired. I wondered how much time had passed, but it was hard to tell. I hadn't brought my phone with me, and I didn't own a watch or anything. But yeah, after however long it had been, when I first noticed feeling tired, I looked around myself and suddenly realized we were all a lot further from the parking lot than when we had started out. Actually, I couldn't even see the streetlights anymore. It was hard to see in the dark, which seemed kind of dangerous, plus I was tired and my whole body was sore, so I decided to stop dancing. Then I looked down at my feet. They were still moving. My brain was thinking it... I was telling myself to stop, but I couldn't control my own body. I just kept dancing in a frenzy, and my arms and legs actually seemed to move even faster, even though my muscles were burning in agony. 

I started freaking out, and looked around at the people near me. I didn't see any of my friends, and I could only barely make out some of their expressions on the faces of these strangers. Some looked scared and confused, like me. But most of them were just dazed, completely expressionless. Throwing themselves into the dance with every ounce of energy they had, a whirlwind of limbs. And still our entire group was steadily moving deeper and deeper into the desert. I couldn't even tell which direction we had come from anymore. 

I tried to open my mouth to ask what was happening, but all I could do was pant from exhaustion, and the words wouldn't come out of my throat. I just kept dancing. The pain in my legs got worse and worse as we danced on, sharp and burning, although that didn't stop them from moving just as fast. All the faces around me were now totally glazed over, and sometimes when they danced really close to me I could see the wet layer of sweat covering their skin. My own mind felt more and more hazy, until finally I also went into some kind of trance or something. Then, I remember what happened. I don't know how long we danced. I just know we went way further into the desert. And the only reason I even know that is that finally, I tripped.

I didn't come back to myself right away. I must have caught my ankle pretty badly on something and twisted it as I fell. Still I got back up and tried to keep dancing with everyone else. I started to regain a little bit of awareness, enough to notice my body was completely drenched in sweat, and my throat felt raw. I had grabbed onto my shoe when I fell, and there was something wet and sticky on my hand. After I got back on my feet, still dazed enough to be numb to the pain, I tried to keep up with the group, but my mangled ankle held me back, and I kept falling. Everyone drifted further and further away from me, and eventually left me completely behind, crumpled in the sand. 

It took a while, but I finally came back to my senses. The first thing I noticed was the excruciating pain in every part of my body, especially my legs and feet. I was dying for a drink of water. My hands shaking, I reached for one of my feet, to try to take off my shoe, but my foot wouldn't come out. That's when I noticed the blood soaking through my sneakers, which had gotten onto my hands. It smelled acrid, coppery, and I retched onto the sand, but only spit up bile, making my throat feel even worse. After resting a few minutes and trying to catch my breath I tried to get up, but the pain was too awful to stand. So I laid down there in the desert and waited to die.

It turns out I wasn't the only one whose feet were bleeding, and that was lucky because it gave the people searching for us a trail to follow. All I could do at first when they found me was gulp down water, so it took a while before I could answer any of their questions, but when I did it just frustrated them. I couldn't explain what had happened to me. And I had no idea where the rest of the group had gone.

Well, they eventually found them. I was at the hospital by then, hooked up to an IV, but someone came to my room to tell me. Some of them fell down along the way, like me, but all of those were dead from heart failure. Everybody else had danced right off the side of a gorge into a ravine. They think most of them died on impact, but some of them might have initially survived the fall. Then some of those got crushed in the pile of bodies raining on them from above. And the ones that were left lay there and died slowly. I was the only survivor.

They told me to stay in my hospital room. I slept for what felt like forever. I don't know, it might have been days. When I woke up, I was hungry and there was no one in the room with me. I grabbed the hospital bed remote and pressed the nurse call button, but nobody came, so after a few minutes I turned on the TV.

It was on the first channel I flipped to. Breakouts of mass dancing hysteria happening everywhere. They said it had started with gatherings of kids but had just kept spreading. Nobody knew what was causing it. The news anchor's eyes were bugging out of her head. She begged people not to go outside. The chiron read "The Pied Piper Plague." 

As I started at the screen, the video cut out, then resumed. It took me a few seconds to realize it was playing on a loop.

I hit the TV power button on the remote in a panic. Would have thrown the remote, except it also had the call button on it. I jammed my finger on that, over and over again. I yelled until my throat was hoarse. And finally, when I couldn't yell anymore, after I had stopped panting and caught my breath, when everything was quiet, I listened. And I heard it. Coming down the hall outside my room.

The dim, but steadily increasing, sound of shuffling and stomping feet.

**Author's Note:**

> Dancing mania is real. Hundreds danced themselves to death in the middle ages.
> 
> Nobody really knows what happened to the children of Hamelin in 1284.


End file.
